McCabe, a frequent target of President Donald Trump's criticism even before the election, stepped down in January from his deputy director position. He was scheduled to retire Sunday after a 22-year career.

Advertisement

Related Content

Though McCabe had spent more than 20 years as a career FBI official, Trump repeatedly condemned him over the last year as emblematic of an FBI leadership he contends is biased against his administration.

McCabe immediately disputed the findings in his own statement, saying the firing was part of a Trump administration "war" on the FBI.

"I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey," McCabe said, referring to the former FBI director who was fired by Trump last May.

The termination puts his ability to receive pension benefits into jeopardy.

McCabe, a lawyer by training, enjoyed a rapid career ascent in the bureau after joining in 1996. He was the FBI's top counterterrorism official during the Boston Marathon bombing and later the FBI's national security branch and its Washington field office, one of the bureau's largest, before being named to the deputy director position.

But he became entangled in presidential politics in 2016 when it was revealed that his wife, during an unsuccessful bid for the Virginia state Senate, had received campaign contributions from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally. The FBI has said McCabe received the necessary ethics approval about his wife's candidacy and was not supervising the Clinton investigation at the time the contributions were made.

McCabe came under scrutiny from the Justice Department's inspector general's office over an October 2016 news report that revealed differing approaches within the FBI and Justice Department over how aggressively the Clinton Foundation should be investigated.

The inspector general's office, which for more than a year investigated the FBI's handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, has concluded that McCabe authorized FBI officials to speak with a journalist for an October 2016 story in The Wall Street Journal.

Though Trump has criticized McCabe as biased in favor of Clinton, the story in question actually undercut that narrative and suggested that FBI officials wanted to more actively probe the Clinton Foundation but were discouraged from taking more aggressive steps by the Obama Justice Department.